Momma Said Knock you Off

Roger Shimomura makes it pop

As witnessed in his latest show, An American Knockoff, seasoned artist
Roger Shimomura’s work walks the line between political statement and
absurdity. A product, he says, that spawns from spending his formative years
trying to find a sense of place.

“Most of my work is based around growing up being
a person of color,” the 73-year-old tells SFR, adding that all the things that “bothered”
him as a child continue to do so today.

Not having any prominent Asian-American figures
in pop culture to look up during his childhood, he looked inside his own family
for inspiration.

“I
was driven by wanting to be like my three uncles, they were all very successful
graphic designers in Seattle,” he reminisces.

Taking
an artistic page from their book, he began to draw all the bountiful items of
consumerist America that he dreamt of having, but that his parents could not provide
on a limited income.

“Drawing
became a way of creating things for myself like Schwinn bicycles and cowboys boots that my
family couldn’t afford,” he recalls, adding that the pages of the Sears Roebuck
catalog provided a seemingly never-ending supply to his fictional-belongings
stockroom.

“There’s
where art set into my psyche.”

And
so, Knockoff displays thirteen works,
all self-portraits, which reflect Shimomura’s love/hate
relationship with what is considered to be authentically American.

“[It’s] buying into that kind of brash consumerism that
characterizes our society and trying to make something positive of it,” the
internment camp survivor says, adding that, for him, the cathartic process was
a mixture of “acceptance with skepticism.”

A
lifelong seeker of acceptance, Shimomura found just it in pop art when the movement
was at its zenith. “Anything that was in our visual landscape was fair to use,”
he muses. “We all bought into the idea that to execute a serious still life,
you had to have wine bottles in it, and pop taught us that it was ok to use a
coke bottle instead."